Glass makers shined in Beaver County

Wednesday

A telegram transformed a key piece of Beaver County glass-making history.

In the late 1860s, H.C. Fry and a few others, glass makers fresh from Civil War battlefields, planned a new glass company in Steubenville.

Negotiations with politicians for land in the Ohio town repeatedly bogged down.

Fry began to look elsewhere. Rochester businessman George Speyerer learned of Fry’s search and suggested plots along low-lying Rochester’s Ohio River banks for the factory. He telegraphed Fry the proposal; Fry accepted. Two hours later, Fry received another telegram — from Steubenville claiming the Ohio deal was a go. It was too late: The Rochester Tumbler Works launched in 1872, and glass making in Beaver County would blaze into full production.

The half-mile-long, 7-acre site, at the foot of what is now East Rochester, would be called the largest and “most important tumbler works in the world.” The glass works employed 1,100 workers at a time, electric lighting, night and day production, at capacity, produced 75,000 dozens of glasses weekly, shipped wares to Europe and was a precursor to the world-renowned H.C. Fry Glass Co. in North Rochester.

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Before steel, glass shined as king of industry in Beaver County’s towns. The glass houses, as the factories were called, both employed natives and lured families from all over the region and even as far as Austria, Germany and Italy to settle here.

From 1870 to 1930, the scrawled writing of census rolls lists thousands upon thousands of Beaver County residents — men, women and children — as packers, blowers, coopers, decorators, etchers, lehrworkers, gatherers, crack-off and carrying-in boys. And glass making, whether cut glass, commercial or pressed, meant bread and butter to local households.

While the Rochester Tumbler Works may have ended up in Beaver County due in part to local business acumen of men like Speyerer, the main draw for glass in the Beaver Valley was simple: Resources.

River, rail, natural gas, electricity, gifted labor and ingredients — like the sand, salt and limestone needed for superior glass — were at the fingertips of glass producers, said Michael Sabo, president of the Fry Glass Society.

“It was the ideal place for the glass boom to happen,” he said. “The rise of glass was amazing here.”

In the last decade of 1800s, more than 4,000 Beaver County workers were walking local vale’s streets to start shifts at glass houses, said Judy Cleary, glass expert for the Beaver County Industrial Museum in Darlington.

“By 1920, 80 percent of America’s glass was produced in the tri-state area,” added Donald Inman, board chair and founder of the museum that preserves the county’s steel and glass stories.

Glass boomed during the post-Civil War to the Depression, Sabo said. Beaver County claimed some of the nation’s largest and most successful glass manufacturers: Rochester Tumbler, Fry, Phoenix Glass (the one surviving glass producer, now Anchor Hocking) and Beaver County Co-Operative Flint Glass.

Cleary said that more than 20 glass houses operated in Beaver County. Names like Point Bottle Works, Keystone Tumbler Works (which is said to have employed 7,000 at one point), Rochester Cut Glass and William A. Meier are just a sliver on the list of glass works where local folk manned the lehrs and produced wares of “extraordinary quality,” said Sabo.

Fry’s glass plant, perched atop the North Rochester plain, was recognized nationally for its quality and technology, Sabo said. The plant operated from 1902 to 1933 and employed about 1,500 workers, who created what many still consider unrivaled cut and art glass to ovenware and a plethora of practical products spanning the glass spectrum from glass doorknobs and mailboxes. It was a newly located, expanded and modernized offspring of the Tumbler Works, which burned in 1901.

Fry wares would, as in the case of a national exhibition piece punch bowl, be sought after by the Shah of Persia and be used at immigrant rough wooden tables.

Sabo pointed out that Fry‘s reach in manufacturing history extended beyond the factory to social awareness. Fry had coal and groceries delivered to families who fell on hard times.

“He brought immigrants here, educated them and their families. The workforce was well-treated and valued by Fry,” said Sabo.

Not far up the Beaver River from Rochester, Co-Operative Flint Glass in Beaver Falls was another example of Beaver County’s colorful glass history. The company, founded in 1879, operated for 55 years in the lower section of Beaver Falls once christened Dutchtown. The co-operative, operated by displaced Pittsburgh glass workers, was funded with $25,000 from the Harmonist Society and was the first glass co-operative in the nation.

While some of the early history was lost to fire, collectors know that the first product line included pressed patterns imitating cut glass, and later products were sought-after colored glass ranging from amber, pink, green, ruby, blues and black to milk glass. Ware lines showcased exquisite jugs and plain bar ware. Experts agree that to produce the amount of wares that the Beaver Falls workforce had to be large and talented.

Both Fry and Co-Op Flint Glass companies became victims of the Great Depression. Other contributing factors to the shattering of glass here includes a trend toward use of metal and silver kitchen wares, lack of availability of ingredients in war time and Prohibition, said Cleary. Sabo attributed Fry’s end to the death of the visionary founder and the economy.

Glass has been made at Phoenix for more than 130 years. Founded in 1880, initially to produce glass tubing to insulate electric wires, the company found its glass niche producing lamp chimneys, light globes and shades, along with light bulbs. Victorian art glass and sculptured Phoenix are pricey dream finds for today’s glass connoisseurs, especially in the nation’s South, Sabo said.

While Phoenix did not capture the world attention of Fry, the quality of wares was excellent, said Sabo and Cleary. In 1900, the company employed more than 1,100 people and the monthly payroll was $40,000 per month, according to museum archives. Cleary attributed Phoenix’s survival and success to the conversion to production of needed materials rather than decorative. During World War II, 90 percent of the Phoenix products were made for the war effort.

Today, of the many glass plants in Beaver County, only the Anchor Hocking chimneys still smoke. However, the area’s legacy remains tempered in the stories of glass and the highly prized wares that survived and are collected.

“Many beautiful things were made here in the county by highly skilled craftsmen. They should be proud if their ancestors were these craftsmen,” Cleary said.

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